Twitter and Facebook Impact on SEO Confirmed

Twitter and Facebook Impact on SEO Confirmed

Twitter and Facebook Impact on SEO Confirmed

Barry Byers9, Dec, 2010

SEO experts have been speculating that Facebook and Twitter now have a significant impact on search engine rankings. Recently, in an interview, Google and Bing finally confirmed that links shared through Twitter or Facebook do have a direct effect on SERPs.

In order to take advantage of this, your need to understand how the links shared in Twitter or Facebook are evaluated. Two new terminologies have entered the field of SEO – ‘Author Authority’ and ‘Social Authority’. The shared links are evaluated based on author authority (a term used by Google) or social authority (a term used by Bing). Both the terms basically mean the same thing, and this authority depends on factors like:

Number of friends: The more the number of friends or followers you have, the more is the importance of your link. Having high authority followers will increase the weight of your link.

Your friend or follower ratio: If your following pattern is mainly based on reciprocity and there is hardly any engagement between you and your followers, then this will lower your authority. The highest authority users are those who have a very high follower/following ratio.

You should also know that the importance given by search engines to particular links may depend on following factors:

Multiple sources: Having a number of links from various accounts is more valuable than having many links from one account.

Messages accompanying links: These are useful in establishing relevance.

Overall quality of tweets or likes: This could increase the importance given to the link.

In all likelihood, there will be many other factors involved in the process. Whatever the case may be, finally the importance of social media marketing in SEO is officially conformed.